


Good Memories

by helsinkibaby



Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-10-30
Updated: 2007-10-30
Packaged: 2018-02-13 14:44:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2154489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/helsinkibaby/pseuds/helsinkibaby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Geordi and Tasha met long before the Enterprise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Good Memories

Geordi’s in his third year when he starts hearing stories about a first year cadet who’s threatening great things – or, depending on who you talk to, is just threatening.

Unlike the rest of the Academy though, he doesn’t need to be told that Natasha Yar is tough – you don’t survive childhood on a hellhole like Turkana IV by being a wallflower.

He also doesn’t need to be told that she’s beautiful, even if all of his friends insist on repeating it.

And when they have an assignment together, and she tells him to call her Tasha, he doesn’t have to be told twice.

>*<*>*<

There are times when he doesn’t know what she sees in him. It’s common knowledge around the Academy that Tasha could have any man she wants, and quite a few of the women too. Why she spends her time with him – an engineering geek whose VISOR draws second and third glances at every turn – is a mystery to him.

He stops worrying about it as he sits on a bench in the grounds one day, waiting for her. He’s talking to Boothby, just passing time, and somehow the subject of his insecurities comes up.

Hearing the words out loud, he knows he sounds foolish, and he feels even more foolish when Boothby snorts. “You know what’s going to happen if you keep worrying she’ll leave you?” he demands, and without waiting for Geordi to reply, he answers his own question. “She’ll leave you.” He gives Geordi a moment to think about that. “Just enjoy what you’ve got,” he finished. “The rest will take care of itself.”

When Tasha comes up to him, wraps her arms around him and presses her lips to his, that’s just what Geordi decides to do.

>*<*>*<

She attends his graduation, goes out to dinner with him and his family, but they both know that this is the end of their time together. She still has two more years to go, he’s shipping out on the Victory in a few weeks, and they’ve agreed it wouldn’t be fair on either of them to conduct a long distance relationship, not when the long distance involves millions of light years.

They part as friends, keep in touch, meet when they can.

When he beams onto the Enterprise D for the first time, she is manning the transporter controls, so her face is the first thing that he sees.

He moved around his entire childhood, his entire life, and in that moment, for the first time, he knows what home feels like.

>*<*>*<

He knows that he’s ill, knows that the thoughts he’s having, the feelings he’s feeling are not real, are not his.

But they are, and that’s the problem, especially when she stands in front of him.

“Help me to not give in to the wild things that come into my mind,” he begs her. Even in his fevered state, he knows that she’s trained in several forms of martial arts – if she could read his mind, illness would be the least of his worries.

Then he hears his almost most secret desire spoken aloud – that he wants to see like she does. She says something about how he already sees better than she does, and he tells her the truth he never told her during those long days and nights at Starfleet Academy.

“I see more, but more isn't better. I want to see in shallow, dim, beautiful, human ways...” He gives into temptation then, touches her face. Her skin is as soft as he remembers, and the thoughts that could ruin their friendship flare again.

Thankfully, one of them is thinking clearly, and she takes his arm, walks with him to sickbay.

He’s not so sure he wants to go there, but he trusts Tasha to keep him safe.

>*<*>*<

He always hoped that once, just once in his life, he’d get to see her. Really see her, the way that everyone else saw her, not just as a collection of patterns and colours through his VISOR.

Then on the bridge of the Enterprise D, his dream comes true. The colours are sharper than he’s ever known, the stars are nothing like he’d imagined, and one by one, he puts faces, actual faces, to his friends.

He wonders if they know that he saves the best for last.

He takes his time turning around, looking up to where she should be, wanting to savour the moment. It’s everything he ever wanted; to see those cheeks that he traced a thousand times, the blonde hair he loved to run his fingers through, the eyes that show a thousand different emotions as she looks down at him. In the instant that their eyes meet, he knows that she feels everything he’s feeling.

“You're as beautiful as I imagined... and more.”

The bridge of the ship, surrounded by the crew, is probably not the best place to say that, but he couldn’t have stopped the words if he’d wanted to. She blushes slightly, and he takes one last look to carry with him for the rest of his life.

Turning to Riker, he does not what he wants, but what is right. “The price is a little too high for me... and I don't like who I'd have to thank. Make me the way I was. Please.”

>*<*>*<

Ever since it happened, he’s been waiting for someone to tell him that it’s all been some huge misunderstanding, some terrible mistake. He keeps waiting for Tasha to breeze onto the bridge, brighten his day with just a few words, but he knows she never will again.

Standing here, underneath a clear blue sky, their comrades, their friends, all around him, he knows that.

It doesn’t mean he has to like it.

When the message clicks on, it’s a physical pain, and he fights the urge to turn, to run. Tasha wouldn’t have taken that from him. There’s more pain when she says that she expected to die on duty, quickly, still more when he hears her say, “Never forget, I died doing exactly what I loved to do.”

That’s his Tasha.

The greatest pain of all, though, is saved for the message that she leaves him.

“In those moments I felt the most despair, you took my hand and helped me to see things differently.”

He remembers the nightmares, the terror, the long silences before she would speak. Remembers how helpless he felt, how the only thing he could do was hold her hand, and later, hold her. Talk to her, tell her everything was going to be all right.

“You taught me to look beyond the moment.”

Funny that, he thinks, because it took her, and a crotchety groundskeeper, to teach him the same thing.

“No goodbyes,” she says. “Just good memories.”

They are the only ones he has of her.  



End file.
